Jazzin' It Up

I have mentioned country in a previous post as a style of music that is not often thought of when talking of 80s music but has made its appearance in the mainstream of popular listening.

Another one is jazz.

For the most part, I am not a fan of jazz. Much of it, to me, sounds like confused instruments fighting for the spotlight. But, naturally, not all of it sounds that way. There are, indeed, some jazz pieces that can give the mental picture of a hot, smoky, crowded jazz hall feel familiar and cozily intimate. Not that I've ever been to a jazz hall. It's just what I picture in my mind when I hear jazz that's pleasant to me.

One such song comes from the Absolute Beginners soundtrack. I have mentioned before that I thought little of the movie itself but there are some notable songs from the film.

"Have You Ever Had It Blue" by The Style Council makes my knees weak. I love the long intro and the buildup to present a voice that could melt the Hershey's factory with a single song.



There's another song that makes me want to sway in a smoky jazz hall. This one is by George Michael, who is not known for his jazz, but his talent in being versatile with music has managed to smooth it onto the charts like massage oil.



Now excuse me while I melt for a bit...

The Subject at Hand

It's September, so many young student bodies are going back to school to... learn.

However, there can be many distractions to paying attention to the subjects at hand, such as being taught by a cute teacher. It has happened to the best of us.

Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher" video shows a bit of what's really on a student's mind sometimes, whether it's what they wish would happen, or that their teacher is, indeed, hot in reality. I find that an unfortunate bit of this video, though, promotes bullying the "weird" kid at school. I'd rather us focus instead on the subject at hand...

Felt-Tip Eyes

Back in the days when pay cable channels was worth it, HBO featured an intriguing music video where it often played cartoons and short films in between featured films.

The video was made cartoon-style animation, but what made this unique was that the frame-by-frame pictures were colored in by felt-tip marker, causing the moving images to change their appearances slightly in each frame.

I have not seen their video on any other music video show so it was cool for me to find it on YouTube after all this time.

The song itself, "Big Brown Eyes" by the dBs has a cool sound to go with it.